Nightmare

A long procession. Everyone young, everyone naked, waiting in line beside a small grove of elm trees. In the heart of the grove is an altar.

The people are silent. They have all taken lethal barbiturates. One by one they enter the grove and sit down amongst the trees.

One woman cannot bring herself to sit down. She looks around for chinks in the composure of the others. She is panicking inside, dreading the hot greedy flush of the poison entering her bloodstream and moving up to her brain: she’s not ready.

A man in front of her staggers, sits heavily and falls sideways.

The woman presses her face into the bark of a tree til her skin and its are meshed almost. She longs to pass through the surface, through the phloem and the cambium and  into the sapwood; to travel up to the leaves and be exhaled, or down to the roots and be released into warm blackness.

What is the antidote to the poison?

Why have we surrendered?

http://saveourforests.co.uk/

Unforgivable reckless stupidity.

http://cryptoforest.blogspot.com/

The vole from the wood

It’s getting late.

She is half-heartedly washing up when the cat comes through the catflap into the kitchen.

A small furry shape dangles from his mouth. He has this awful habit of carrying them by the head. He puts it down, and the woman shoos him away and picks it up. A short-tailed field vole. Its eyes are open, it is warm and soft. It is beautiful. It does not look damaged. She brings her hand close to her face and squints at the little thing lying on her palm. Standing as still as she can, she tries to feel if its heart is beating, or if there is breath or twitch. For a moment she is still enough to listen to its body with her skin. But she can discern no pulse.

Maybe it is in a coma. Do voles go into comas? She imagines for a moment the sort of resuscitation she could do to rouse it, and giggles despite herself. Turning it over, she strokes its belly and notices its tiny teats. The woman herself has just scored positive on a pregnancy test and wonders if there are doomed babies somewhere nearby in a burrow.

The woman puts on her boots to take it outside. But slowly. She realises she is stalling:  she wants to keep the little vole indoors in a box lined with cotton wool, just in case it wakes up. She would like to meet it properly.

1985. Twelve years old. Home from school, on a damp November night. She notices that Hammy the Hamster hasn’t moved since she peeped at him this morning. Dread-filled, yet already knowing the truth, she opens the hamster’s house and lifts his cold little orange body from the fluffy bedding. She strokes him, bringing him close to her face, looking minutely at his front teeth and his whiskers, wanting somehow to memorise the details of him before he has to go into the flowerbed tomorrow. She shudders at the thought of soil on his fur, and the microbes going about their work. She puts him into a shoebox lined with toilet paper, and continues to stroke him tenderly.

2005. The woman’s son is a month old, and she is enchanted by him. He is the most extraordinary thing she has ever seen. One day she notices the whorl of his dark hair as it spirals outward from a place on the crown of his head. No-one else has ever noticed this detail, she realises. It is a brand new phenomenon. Paying attention to the tiniest details of her new child is her job alone. This whorl of hair is a universe in itself, it seems to her, and then and there she etches it permanently into her consciousness.

Now she touches the vole’s ear, which has been squashed: she unfolds it and smoothes it back into place. It is very delicate, like one of those tiny cup fungi that stand up from the leaf litter in the woods on damp mornings. Furtively she looks into the vole’s eyes, trying to discern a response, before gently closing them. An image of soil falling onto the glistening cornea surfaces and bothers her.

The cat manages to catch these creatures in the darkness, yet the woman never sees them alive. He is her connection to them. She envies him his relationship with the moist woodland by the house. She wishes she could get inside his skin and sense the world as he does. Killing, for the cat, is nature – whereas the woman has been a vegetarian since childhood. She hates the killing. The little birds are the worst. They fight until they are half-eaten. But, since it was she who bought him as a kitten and brought him here, she is complicit in every one of his murders. The cat is her surrogate wild side.

She rouses herself to take the vole outside. The stars are brilliant, but with no moon visible the night is utterly black. She stumbles, clumsy and slow, over to the trees, and drops the vole gently into the undergrowth. Turning back to the house she sees the cat silhouetted against the glass kitchen door, as he trots out into the night again.

 

 

11.10.10

 

To change the way we do things, we need to speak differently about things.

Last night I made a cosy sleepover den for Felix and his little friend by the fire. We were drowsing there, quieted by the flames, when we heard a squealing sound coming from the logs. If I hadn’t just laid out the wood, I would have feared that there was a mouse trapped in the fireplace.

Then I remembered something I heard long ago about the moisture inside the wood squeaking as it turns to steam and escapes through pores in the material: fresh wood squeals when you burn it.

It sounded so much like a cry of distress that I found myself wondering if it could possibly be that. Is that ridiculous?

Recently, I went to a lecture on phenomenology in which the speaker urged us to ‘participate in a thought experiment’ in which we were to try to speak about non-humans (that means everything around us) from now on as though they experienced things subjectively in their own ways.

I find it hard to do this for things like laptops and trainers, but I am convinced that trees have experiences. Radical plurality, he called it: a world full of experiencing beings, all different, all in relationship.

So: if a living tree is cut down, at what point does it die? Of course it is doomed from the moment the blade cuts across its girth – but is the trunk actually dead as it falls to the ground? When does the life leave?  I remember finding a row of freshly-felled oaks along the route of the then-planned Newbury Bypass in January 1996. This is what I wrote:

“I feel as though I am in the presence of a person who has just been killed. Not actually even dead yet. It happens more slowly than that. Like the life is still there, still around the tree, haemorrhaging, almost pulsing, then ebbing or fading like a mist, like an exhaled breath. Gradually.   I sit silently holding the tree in the warm sunshine for a long time. It is a blissfully beautiful morning, prematurely spring-like. Very quiet. The whole place is in shock, it seems to me.”

As I looked at the burning wood on the fire last night, I tried to imagine the log as a branch or a part of a trunk. What tree was it from? What state was it in when it was felled? Was it old and tired, diseased, ready to go? Or did it resist? Did it have another century of rings still to grow? Was it strong, pulsing with life, thrusting outwards?

I guess that wood dies slowly. I guess it dies as it dries, the moisture and the life leaving it as an expired sigh.

Green wood smokes, bitterly complaining when you try to burn it. Resisting. Hissing and squealing. Forcing tears from your eyes. Not ready to go. Yet once seasoned, when enough time has passed since the drama, the trauma of its felling, it is ready to burn, offering itself readily to the flames, ready to become dust again.

Phones and Weevils

 

Invisible Theatre commission for the Green Theatre Project. Invisible Theatre is provocative theatre which takes place in public places and hopefully invites others’ participation.

 

Phones and Weevils

 

A &B are travelling together on the tube or bus. B is twiddling awkwardly with phone. They may get on and off trains, talking continually, animatedly, perhaps pacing platforms or escalators.

 

A: Posh phone. Is it new?

B: Yeah, it’s fancy isn’t it? I kind of like it and hate it at the same time. I don’t understand half of what it does. It was really confusing in the shop – so many handsets, I went in there just wanting something really simple and basic, and then I started thinking: Actually maybe I need a camera built in, oh and a touch screen would be lovely… but at the same time I was feeling how ugly it all was, ugly and banal, all the packaging, all the offers, all the gadgets, all the screens, all the insincere sales talk, to be honest it was making me feel all sweaty and sick. I had a flash of insight in the shop, I thought: Maybe I’ll just walk out of here without a phone, I’ll just give up the habit right now… but then I thought, I’ll be paying the bastards my tariff anyway for the next six months, and this is a nice thing, and I want it. So I got it.

A: And you need one really, don’t you? Wouldn’t it be sabotaging your life to try to get by without one?

B: I don’t know. I’m too scared to try. I wish I were more like those American Bolt Weevil activists in the 1970s. They were farmers whose land was being compulsorily bought by power companies to build a massive new power line across the States. They systematically sabotaged new pylons and power equipment and delayed the construction process for years. I read an activist book that said we should all be dismantling phone masts to save bees and migratory birds from electromagnetic pollution. The idea is that you would just go around with a spanner in your pocket waiting for the right moment to unscrew a few strategic bolts and wait for a strong breeze to bring the tower down. But I got a new phone instead. I’m pathetic.

A: To be fair, things have moved on since the 70s. We all want mobile phones…. I just watched a trailer for a new film made by a tribe from the Colombian rainforest. They’ve made this film to warn us about how we’re killing the Earth – they want to show us that it is possible to live in harmony with the rest of nature. They’ve just been in England to promote it. They’ll probably get chickenpox now or something.

B: Don’t be horrible! Wouldn’t it be great to go out there and learn to live sustainably like them? I really fancy that. But that would mean flying there, which would kind of negate any benefits.

A: And it’s warm in the rainforest, isn’t it? I mean, the sheer effort involved in keeping warm through a winter in northern Europe would be a full time job without fossil fuels.

B: Yes, I wonder what it would be like if the power stations ran out of power in the winter and we had to get by without heating and cookers. It would re-shape society.

A: We wouldn’t have time to go the office anymore.

B: We’d all be fighting over firewood –

A: – Farmers with shotguns would be fending people off their woodland.

B: It would change the way you look at things – you would gather sticks, you’d go out of the town more. It would be a much more effective way of changing lifestyles than any environmental protest. Adapt or freeze.

A: People would start chain-sawing down the trees in the parks. Imagine Hyde Park post-peak oil: just loads of stumps of ancient oaks. Yes, fuck the ancient oaks when it comes to them versus us, we’d burn every twig.

B: Or would armed police surround them with tanks and razor wire and protect them with machine guns?

A: …Machine-gun us down as we set out snares for squirrels and birdlime to catch pigeons.
[They laugh]
…But what would happen to our values if we couldn’t rely on oil anymore? It’s amazing how much energy is locked up in a drop of oil, compared with any form of renewable energy. We’ve grown completely used to basing all our expectations and habits on the availability of this unbelievably rich substance. Imagine future archaeologists in 31st century digging through landfill and finding disposable nappies, wondering what kind of a society would take babies’ poo and wrap it up in plastic and toxic chemicals and bury it. I think they would consider it an insane culture. I hope they would.

B: I think it would be great, people would adapt, they’d find creative ways of surviving. Right now most of us live in fear of these perceived horrors – what if there was no more food on the supermarket shelves? What if the tubes stopped running? What if the phones went dead? We have this learned dependency, this terror of the lights going out. I wonder which survival instincts are hard-wired into our animal brains, and which would take longer to learn.

A: By burning fossil fuels we are unleashing all these terrifying changes that threaten everything familiar to us. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I think about how we won’t collectively stop using fossil fuels until we are absolutely forced to . Part of me can’t wait for the oil to run out. I don’t think we can give up the addiction until we have no choice at all.

B: I read recently that all the UN intergovernmental climate convention process over the last two decades has achieved nothing at all in terms of reduced carbon dioxide emissions.

A: Just look at my own life as an example: I have a little girl and I work miles from home so I have to drive, even though I hate it. When I think deeply about it I feel bad feelings – threatening, frightening feelings like despair and panic, like futility and self-loathing… I freak out and tremble and shout at the grotesque inadequacy of all our political responses, and of my own compromised position and weakness. It makes me want to curl up into a ball. And then – and then – I find myself walking down the high street looking in shop windows at pretty things and wanting to make myself feel better by buying something…

B: Like this phone. I feel really bad about this phone.

A: Well maybe you could use it to promote radical political protests or something. What’s it called – tweeting? Like the pro-democracy activists did in Iran last year. Come on, we can do better than despair. I love the sound of those Bolt Weevils. I love people who tie themselves to trees and whaling ships. I wish I could do that. If I didn’t have a child I would like to go out there and do some crazy stunts. Maybe I should take her with me and do them anyway, as an antidote to despair.

B: Despair can never be the endpoint… Isn’t there a theory that there are five stages of grief? Denial, anger, bargaining, despair and acceptance. Then what? What does acceptance mean for an activist?

A: I guess it would mean… accepting that the planet is being killed.

B: But then how would you carry on, if you have accepted that the planet is being killed? Isn’t that like accepting that someone is in the process of being murdered? It would make you completely sick.

A: You’re right – you could never morally accept that. It’s a process, not a fait accompli. Fuck acceptance. Bring on the Bolt Weevils, and the climate suffragettes.

B: Yes. There is something about direct action that inspires hope. Not hope that international processes will work, or that governments will do the right thing ecologically. But hope in people’s resilience and creativity, and their ability to learn and take risks.

A: Yet we lower our eyes, and get on with the business of surviving in this society-

B: – Buying the phones, sending the texts – accepting the cognitive dissonance that you have to endure when you are enduring incompatible versions of reality.

A: Is this actually primarily a moral problem? After all, who, really, wants to kill the planet? Look at America – we bang on about them, and yet as individuals they are all tied into this system of exaggerated oil dependency by living in a country with virtually no public transport. And China, we moan about them building coal power stations, but they use that power to run factories that export the products we demand to see in our shops. If I lived in America or China I would be moulded – and constrained – by the imperatives of my culture, just as I am here -

B: – Just as you would be if you lived in the Maldives -

A: – Yes…These giant economic and cultural machines seem to pit me caring for my family against me caring for families far away. Maybe we should try to empathise with each other more and be less judgemental.

B: I love the idea of empathy. Empathy and gratitude. My theory is that wherever we are, we all depend on the land, and we should be more grateful. When did we stop being grateful? We should say thank you to the trees, and the animals, and the weather, and the soil. We should go outside and thank them, and listen to what they say in reply.

A: Try making that a policy proposal for the UNFCCC or the Prime Minister. [They laugh again.]

B [referring to phone]: I think I’m going to take this back, and get a reconditioned one.

A: Go on, I dare you. I’ll get you a spanner for Christmas.

B: Get one for your little girl!

Persephone Pearl October 2010



Blackbird tree

In hospital.

I wake at 3am. I am anxious. I am full of longings. I need to sink into a place; I need to feel my roots wriggling downwards into deep earth.

I lie for ages trying to sleep, trying to breathe slowly, hands clasped over belly. Gradually the dark sky grows paler behind the shrubs outside.  What kind of a day will this be? What will I see of it? Being in bed in hospital has changed, for now, my relationship to the dynamic patterns beyond the window: mostly, there is just this patch to look out at.

The early light reaches a critical level and I become aware of a blackbird sitting quietly in the little tree a few feet away. I’ve seen it before – a solitary male. He must live here.  My neighbour. No nest, just a hideaway branch.

I think I see the moment the bird wakes up.

He is round – head nestled down on shoulders, beak on breast. His movements are small and slow when he first opens his eyes. I watch the blackbird gather himself and get ready for the day ahead. He grooms. His movements grow larger and livelier. He preens, shakes, scratches, ruffles and smoothes his feathers for at least half an hour.  I eat a bowl of muesli perched on the bed on my side of the glass. He hops down from his favoured perch in the little tree to catch his own breakfast.

Rhododendron caterpillar

My room in hospital is a gloomy cave for me to hide in. I feel myself cocooned in the shade here, a wonky creature coming back to life. Private. Letting myself feel whatever emotions arise and move my altered limbs unseen.

A beautiful caterpillar crawls up the rhododendron bush outside my window and wobbles about at the tip of a leaf by the glass. It is spiky and furry, orange and yellow and black.  It has great black antlers, and tufts along its back and bum that resemble bundles of toothbrush bristle. It has big shiny black eyes and white jaws. I peer through the grimy window into its face.

The caterpillar walks to the very end of the leaf and looks down. Its antlers, face and front half droop straight downwards in the air. It stays like that for ages. Then, eventually, it edges back, turns around and sets off to walk down the plant the sensible way. I identify with the way it balances purposeful movement and utter lost-ness.

My central nervous system is a tree

I drew a little cartoon of my brain and spinal cord today and was shocked to see that I had drawn a tree with roots.

At the moment, the bark of my spine-tree has been damaged at a point on the trunk, as though a deer has nibbled its way around it, or a kid has had a go with a penknife. How many roots have withered for lack of the juicy brain impulses that can’t get past the ring-barked part of the cord? And what about the stuff coming up from the leg-roots – what happens to that?

How long does it take for bark to grow back?

Soliphilia

Growing up, the little girl cried often at the things humans were doing to the planet and to each other. She did sponsored walks to save the otters, knew the common name of every British butterfly, and set up a Council whose mission was to rescue drowning worms from puddles.
Secondary school was a brutal place where a hierarchy of girls kept each other in line through various degrees of emotional cruelty. This girl, being flat-footed and flat-chested until she was fifteen, kept a low profile. The boys on the train never looked at her and her adolescent female friendships were confusing. She found solace in worshipping her English teacher, and poured her soul into creative writing as a form of adulation.
At eighteen she spent a year working at a boarding school in Australia. She was under-utilised (cling-wrapping library books) and tried to run away to volunteer at a rhino reserve in Sumatra; but her mother forbade it, and being an obedient girl she stayed put.
At university she studied philosophy and literature. Philosophy seemed mostly ridiculous: why on earth were these people discussing whether or not the physical world existed, when were in the process of destroying it? She did not, however, posit a connection between these two phenomena. She was never a bold student and always felt that if she had got through more of the vast reading list she would not have such stupid objections. Ethics excited her though. She went hunt sabotaging, and felt alive.
She discovered trapeze at that time and threw herself into it with a passion, discovering a physical adeptness she had never imagined she might possess, and a direct immediacy of experience that she yearned for.
Then in January 1996 she went with her best friend to Newbury, where seven miles of ancient woodland were being fought over by those wanting to build a road through it and those trying to protect it. This was a profound experience. Primeval oaks. Badger setts. Full moon over snow. Woodsmoky tea with anarchists. She identified with the environmental protesters but always struggled with the Us and Them mentality. All the time, she was searching for the soul looking out from each security guard’s face – trying to connect, trying to find the commonality and the common sense beneath the costume. What about the Common Good? Her tears were always there, waiting to brim over at any confrontation.
One day she found herself dangling in a harness from a doomed tree, diggers beneath her, fire all around, rage and pain gargling out of her, larger than her body. If she had been better versed in radical thought, she might have concluded from that experience that government policymakers don’t listen to ecological wisdom. Instead, wanting to be a good girl, and averse to conflict, she shied away from ‘dropping out’. She decided to take a different approach: she moved to London and set about arming herself with facts and figures, with the intention of working in government or policy to help bring about environmental change from within the institutions of power.
But in order to work in academia and campaigning she systematically devalued her own unique gifts. She didn’t see how her tentative creativity and her raw heart fitted into that context. She had had a good education. She was one of the most privileged people on the planet. How could her fumbling efforts at art-making ever be justified as a serious way of giving back? The scale of the crisis was so immense there could surely be no time for anything more than the most focused fighting of it. She believed that she only needed to learn the language of scientific objectivity, and rational argument; she might become an effective footsoldier if she channelled her ecological pain into her attempts to develop rhetorical powers of persuasion and polemic.
But she continued to wake up in the night with adrenalin pulsing through her veins, and to cry and shout at news stories of whaling and disappearing islands.
The girl read nothing but science and environmental policy textbooks for years. But it was to no avail. The language was difficult for her and she could not master it. She was mediocre. She was stupid. She floundered and found hot embarrassed tears prickling her eyes at environmental industry networking events. She felt no affinity with the middle-aged men all around her; she sweated and squirmed in suits and smart shoes; she stared out of double-glazed windows at the sky. She dreamt of scurrying forms, and sunlight shining through leaves.
The girl could not yet articulate the profound tension between the ecological facts that she recognized and felt in her body, and the patriarchal business- and technology-centric operating mode that she was attempting to fit into. She was battered by her participation in the discourse of impending ecological doom and techno-solutions. She didn’t understand it consciously but her body knew it of course. After work each day she kept training as a trapeze artist. In the circus school she could find some kind of escape, some portal to a dream-life, a sanctuary where there was only breath, muscle, rope, metal, fear, delight. She discovered a kindred spirit there and together they talked of revolution and created aerial performances laden with what they hoped was metaphor.
At weekends she went dancing, sometimes performing on the trapeze, searching for some communion, some kind of wordless dissolving, some beauty, something unfathomable.
❦
She longed to escape from the confines of her working world, but the familiar feelings of mediocrity were simply transferred to the circus when she attempted to find work there. When the skills she had been nurturing so privately and shyly were transferred into a commercial domain she discovered that the world of performance could be elitist, narcissistic and judgmental. She felt clumsy and stupid. It was shattering. She retreated and vowed not to expose herself like a dog doing tricks and risk being judged again. She watched the bendy girls and the ferociously ambitious rising stars from the edge of the room. She felt sick with longing for their glamorous camaraderie. She was fat and stiff compared to them. She had two left feet. She would never fit in. Her friend moved abroad. Her ludicrous longing to somehow integrate ecological insight and aerial practice stayed private.
Then after a trip to India she started making and using puppets. Something about their metaphorical essence gave her a new way to speak. Like a door into a primitive unconscious. In puppetry she discovered some of the most moving theatre she had ever seen. She got a job as a performer at a tiny puppet theatre. She met three women there who would go on to become her true sisters. She loved it and felt utterly alive when devising, but on tour she felt lonely – echoes of her loneliness in the circus and the conference centre – yearning for deeper, slower relationships, for dialogue, rather than the fleeting intangible connection between the audience and the performer during a show.
She trained as a teacher. After work on the fourth day of the week in which she started her PGCE, the young woman found herself in a primary school caretaker’s room, huddled with strangers around a television, watching blurred footage of a plane flying into a tower. Words failed. The world made no sense. How do you teach in a world that makes no sense? What do you teach? Where do you begin? She took to working 60-hour weeks, partying all weekend, and furtively spending her wages on expensive clothes.
In school, she thrived on relationship but struggled mightily with hierarchy and crowd control. All the prescriptions and rules. It was a brutal, brutalising place. She was overwhelmed by all those consciousnesses, all that potential, those complex young psyches and their needs and their surging fragile egos. She felt that everyone there including her needed therapy, and longed for a gentler way of learning.
❦
Numbed away from introspective reflection, and driven by biological instinct, she got married impulsively to a poor match and became a mother. Many hours into her labour, she grew afraid that she was dying – that she would not be able to push the baby out. Then she had a body-vision. She felt herself connected to all the women, all the mammals who had ever given birth, the women on piles of blankets, in hospitals and in huts and caves, all the mares and does and lionesses on their sides, all the female creatures on that threshold, as well as the babies they were bringing into the world – those who died and those who succeeded; she understood in her fibres that she was part of a ceaseless continuum of life making life; her son was born – and so, in a way, was she.
Having a baby shone new light on all her ecological pain. Absolute intimacy and connection. The paradoxical sorrow and beauty of initiating a new consciousness into this world. Warmskin thumbsuck hairwhorl kiss. Milkleak.
New motherhood taught the woman hard lessons: how difficult it is to lumber upstairs with the groceries and a baby in a buggy; how people watch and like to tell you how to parent, and judge your every decision; how exhaustion makes your eyes sink back into your skull; how invisible you become, how angry you feel, how you discover that sexual equality is a myth, how the entire persona you have created for yourself falls away as you become animal, become food, become servant, become anonymous; how much work women do silently because it needs to be done, how that work is mostly unpaid and often unacknowledged even by those closest to you. How you have to teach your children to modify their instincts to fit in with norms, how helping them grow up is helping them to navigate a sick culture, how you have to explain words like extinct and war, how you fear continually that they will run into the road, how they are mesmerized by lousy films, how you have to clench your teeth as well-meaning people feed them sweets and plastic guns. How disposable nappies do not biodegrade.
One day she looked out of the window and saw the tree outside her house being cut down. That tree had been a guardian, making her feel sane. She watched the entire process and sensed that she would not be living in that house, with her husband, much longer either. She remembered Newbury, the trees stripped of their branches systematically, underneath the person at the top left waiting in the snow for the inevitable crane and handcuffs.
❦
Discovering that she could no longer navigate as an honorary man or as a pliant young person who could just fit in and take the path of least resistance, the woman found herself using an unfamiliar voice – an assertive voice that said,
This will not do. There is more to living than this. There is another way. I don’t know what, but I know it doesn’t feel like this.
She left her bad marriage, and took her son to live by the sea. As soon as she arrived, a community of women opened its arms to her. Her voice lost its high choked tightness and regained its familiar timbre.
She often sat on the beach with her son and watched him play with the pebbles. She read feminism, and primitivist polemic. She began to volunteer at the community allotment and to learn about growing food. The men there spoke little and had cracked, blackened hands. Emerging from the compost toilet one evening, seeing the sun setting and the chickens pecking, she found tears running down her face and realized that somehow this place had saved her. She knelt. She wanted to give it thanks and honour it. She wondered about bringing her own creativity there, and asked her two best friends if they would make a site-specific performance with her.
This was an exciting time. Something new was happening. Working outside, and in kitchens, surrounded by toddlers, and drinking tea, mingling intense philosophy and gossip, the women were gestating a feral theatre company. They trusted and knew each other intimately. They were purposeful, balancing and pushing each other.
Many people came to the Samhain performance. They sat on planks and straw bales in brilliant autumn sunshine. It was a puppet story about seeds and sacrifice. Children intervened frequently. There was music, and fire afterwards, and food (always lots of food), and cider, and blankets and dogs, and a view of the night sea.
❦
After this, the women know that they need to develop this work. They decide to spend a whole year making place- and season-specific performances to celebrate the equinoxes and solstices, and the cross-quarters. They discover ancient words and try them in their mouths: Ostara. Imbolc. Mabon. They practice howling at the moon. Through an improvised process they find they are connecting with a deeper awareness of time and place. This is their land; it’s an epiphany, realising that! They begin to remember what they had known as children, before they got distracted by trying too hard to be grown-up.
They learn about witchcraft and shamanism. They want to honour the mothers and tribes before them: the uncounted women, and whole primitive cultures, with unwritten names and forgotten stories who have died, many of them silenced violently. They realise that they are connecting to a lineage, an oral tradition that is in jeopardy. Yet using the old language and rituals feels awkward and stiff – the women cannot simply pick up these tools and use them; they refer to a world now past, to faraway places and forgotten skills. The women need to find a language that reflects their own contemporary experience as well as recognising that of their foremothers, and of the victims of their culture’s psychotic rampage around the world. They also seek to listen to what this place and these beings here and now are telling them about what is happening now and what has gone before.
They are searching for a language, a feral language of art in which words are not primary, in which the company supports the individual selves in a creative dissolving which gives way to some kind of symbiotic larger self, with the players and their faculties not separate but flowing. Instinctively they are creating a transpersonal working process.
They obsess over the idea of activism and what that means in the context of art. How to shift the language of change from polemic to heart, belly, soul? How can their work enhance political struggle whilst nurturing a different sort of transformation? They tell each other their dreams and their dreamt-up stories, and with each telling they discover their own unconscious yearnings, and hold space for new insights and connections to emerge. Clumsily they are fumbling towards a shared ecological language in which private longings and sorrows are heard, and recognized as universal, epic, primal. Yes – the urge to worship and give thanks is innate.
They make up songs.
They cook feasts with food from the allotments.
They are enthusiastic and make mistakes.
They talk about the power of women’s groups, and the value of their own improvised, intuitive methodology. What does it mean, to make feral art? It is not straightforward. It is an aspiration and a journey.
They have no money. They use only found materials. They make puppets out of straw and old jumpers. They explore Peter Brook’s concept of Rough Theatre, in which all the actors have is their skill, their ingenuity and their complicity. They improvise. Sometimes the work is disappointing, inadvertently clichéd; this happens if it incorporates preconceptions rather than rigorously personal insights. The difficult tensions inherent in the effort to parent, to be earth citizens, and to make something beautiful are explored and expressed and feed into the best of their theatre.
At last, the woman in this story feels that she has found her place: this is what she wants to do with her life. But the feral theatre company undergoes a dramatic transformation as one earth-sister moves abroad and the other has a second child. The woman vows to keep this newborn Feral Theatre alive. She has to – otherwise nothing makes sense. But how can she do it alone? She feels lost again, scared again, scared that she will never find anything so beautiful again. Scared of what her voice will sound like if she tries to sing the feral songs alone. She is scared of losing the empathic human connection which has given her the space and the courage to connect creatively with the more-than-human.
❦
In spring, she reads Arne Naess’s ‘Self-Realization’. When he describes his empathy for a dying flea, a light goes on inside her: the founding father of the Deep Ecology movement is describing precisely her own experience. The thing she knew from the beginning of her life – the childhood grief she felt for the fat caterpillar she saw crushed by a car; the parched newt on the pavement outside her home; the fallen nest, the mauled gerbil, the broken sapling – that feeling was real and important. She has spent a lifetime chastising herself for making babyish or sentimental displays; yet suddenly here is a powerfully authoritative voice assuring her that her empathy is not something to apologise for.
Her sense of connection is not an illusion. Her longing is grounded in a basic need. She is an ecological self – a displaced ecological being – like the newt on the kerb, like the polar bear on a concrete iceberg. She is part of a web whose strands are coming loose. The pain and the beauty of connectedness are like motherhood. Those beings are part of her and she is part of them. The tears she sheds for the coral reefs and the giant oaks – they are their tears. These beings are her: her family.
And the feral theatre company is also part of this huge family, which extends to a biophilic solidarity, an expanded sense of connection with all beings, beyond polemic or language. The woman sees that when we recognize that we are ecological selves, then there will be no need for polemic, because we will understand that hurting others is hurting ourselves – and so, rather than moral acts, we will perform beautiful acts. Beautiful acts. Suddenly here it is, a language for what she has been trying to do all this time. Feral theatre: beautiful acts.
And she smiles when she realizes that her Feral earth-sisters are not gone, but spread out: one making a travelling puppet theatre, one clowning in children’s hospitals. And there are others, countless other feral sisters and brothers, some beloved, some faraway and unknown, some old, some unborn. Their web-strands are like gossamer in sunlight, floating, but still connected, touching new surfaces and creating new configurations; beautiful acts extending gently outwards towards undreamt-of possibilities.

Persephone Pearl, May 2010

Note:
Soliphilia is a new word meaning ‘an all-encompassing love for the whole that manifests in unity and solidarity. A collective and proactive response to the death of nature.’ (Glenn Albrecht, 2010)